Shutterstock adds an image editor to unstock your stock photos

Stock photo site Shutterstock has been around since 2003 but now the stock photo site gotten an 21s century upgrade. The site now has a built in photo editor that lets you create clever graphics on the fly for social media, sharing, and blogging.

The tool is fairly rudimentary – you can add text and images to the photos as well as filters – but it’s fun. The impetus was simple: users would pay for downloads but then get stuck trying to edit them. By making the editor dead simple – and it is – they can offer just a touch more usability to the stock images.

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“We started to hear from customers that they wanted more tools and features to help them create their perfect image. After their download, many people still had work to do to crop or resize or add a filter to their images,” said Catherine Ulrich, Chief Product Officer. “Those edits were taking place elsewhere. With Editor, we have not only streamlined that process, but we’ve also made it more intuitive and easier for non-designers to perform basic design techniques. We’ve removed barriers and have offered customers the ability to preview a finished work before purchasing.”

“This is Shutterstock’s first move into workflow to help solve customers’ problems.”

The tool is popular with small business owners who want to download and create images quickly. The editor includes multiple templates and themes as well as pre-cropped sizes for Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. The goal is to make it dead simple to edit the thousands of photos on the site without downloading an image editor or paying for tools like Pixelmator or Photoshop. Like other online editing tools we’ve played with including Gravit it’s fairly limited but getting better – which can be said of most browser-based tools these days.

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